ABSTRACT: Children tend to confuse reversible letters such as b and d when they start learning to read. According to some authors, mirror errors are a consequence of the mirror generalization (MG) process that allows one to recognize objects independently of their left– right orientation. Although MG is advantageous for the visual recognition of objects, it is detrimental for the visual recognition of reversible letters. Previous studies comparing novice and expert readers demonstrated that MG must be inhibited to discriminate reversible single letters. In this study, we investigated whether MG must also be inhibited by novice readers to discriminate between two pseudowords containing reversible letters. Readable pseudowords, rather than words, were used to mimic early non-automatic stages of reading when reading is achieved by decoding words through grapheme–phoneme pairing and combination. We designed a negative priming paradigm in which school-aged children (10-year-olds) were asked to judge whether two pseudowords were identical on the prime and whether two animals were identical on the probe. Children required more time to determine that two animals were mirror images of each other when preceded by pseudowords containing the reversible letter b or d than when preceded by different pseudowords containing the control letter f or t (Experiment 1) or by different pseudowords that differed only by the target letter f or k (Experiment 2). These results suggest that MG must be inhibited to discriminate between pseudowords containing reversible letters, generalizing the findings regarding single letters to a context more representative of the early stages of reading.

ABSTRACT. Persistent mistakes at schools are dif cult for teachers, parents, and most of all the children to deal with. Children who keep making the same mistakes tend to be viewed as bad students, but here we propose a different point of view! We think that children often make mistakes not because they do not know the correct answer, but because they fail to block a quicker but wrong answer that seems to make sense. Studies of the brain actually revealed that children, as well as adults, use an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex to inhibit persistent mistakes. Learning to inhibit these mistakes is thus a promising way to help children overcome dif culties at school as well as to help us think more logically as we face problems in everyday life.

ABSTRACT. Science education is often challenged by students' misconceptions about various phenomena. Recent studies show that these misconceptions coexist with scientific conceptions, even after a conceptual change occurs. However, the mechanisms involve in overcoming the interference caused by this coexistence remain poorly understood. A possible explanation is that inhibition could play a role in learning science. An fMRI protocol was used to obtain functional brain images of novices and experts while performing a cognitive task in mechanics, a scientific discipline for which misconceptions are known to be frequent and persistent. The results show that experts, significantly more than novices, activate brain areas associated with inhibition: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This suggests that the experts' misconceptions in mechanics have not been eradicated or transformed during learning; they would rather have remained encoded in their brain and were then inhibited to provide a correct answer.